The First Book Comes Off the Presses

Sep 27, 2013

RUSH: So I’m sitting in my library, and I am in the process of winding down from some show prep, and the door opens and in walks Kathryn. She’s all excited. She’s just beaming, and she’s got something in her hand. She’s just as excited as she can be. She looks at me, says, “Here it is. It’s here.” I said, “What? What?” She said, “The book.” And, lo and behold, folks, there it is, the first copy off the presses of the upcoming New York Times and everywhere else best seller, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.

There it is. I just wanted to show you. That’s a real book. It’s a children’s book in the sense that it’s written for the 10- to 13-year-old reader, but it’s for everybody. It’s for parents and grandparents to buy and read with and give to the young crumb crunchers out there who are not being taught the truth about the basics of this country’s history, and particularly the founding of this country that has been so — pardon the term –“bastardized.” It has been so revised. The multiculturalists have gotten hold of the public school curricula.

They basically teach that this country was founded in an immoral, unjust way, and that the arrival of our ancestors led to the corruption of what was a pristine continent, what was a great piece with the indigenous peoples. And our ancestors arrived here and began to be selfish. They used up everything and they just created havoc. That’s what’s taught now and it isn’t true, and the American story starts with the Pilgrims. It’s not just the story of the first Thanksgiving, but who they were; where they came from; why they wanted to leave where they were; what it was like; what they endured to get here; what happened when they got here; what was it that finally made it all work for them when they got here. All of that is here in a true history story for young people who may for the first time in their lives when reading this, hear this. They hear this story for the first time, and it’s the truthful story.

Now, we have a copy of the book. I’m holding it right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers in my left hand. It’s a children’s book, but it’s a real book. It’s not some little pamphlet. It goes on sale October 29th, as many of you know. Pre-orders started, I don’t know, three weeks ago, month ago. And I didn’t know this, but there is an advantage to pre-ordering, and that is the pre-order price at Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble is around $10.99, something like that. The retail price of this masterpiece, $19.99. So there is a financial incentive to pre-ordering. But there it is, folks.

Here, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna zoom in. So proud of this thing. I told people I’m so proud and they said, “Rush, you’ve done this before. You’ve had two books.” I know, I know. But this, folks, this is exciting. This is, you know, a whole new project, never done something like this before. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. And you can look as hard as you want, you will not find my e-mail address on that cover. So don’t worry. I’m not blowing any security here. Let me zoom in a little tighter. Turning the Dittocam off. There you go. There we have it. Is that not pretty? Hubba hubba. And again, hardcover, e-books and audio version on October 29th, pre-orders now.

We’re just so excited about this. We got two of these. We’ve got two copies that came in, so they’re off the printing press and they’re on the way out. I’m gonna show you one more thing. I’m just gonna open the book at random and show you that it is even printed in an historic way with-age-old looking paper, and there’s some great illustrations in this thing, too. I don’t want to hold it up too long because people will read the pages. But we’re so excited about this. Everybody that worked on it is extremely proud, and there weren’t too many, but — he-he-he — anyway, folks, there it is, Rush Revere, the icon of our wonderful little iced tea company, Two If By Tea, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Rich in Columbia, Maryland. Hi, Rich. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. So glad you could take my call today. I’ve been listening for probably close to 20 years now, and the thing I’ve always enjoyed most about you is what a great teacher you are, and that sorta leads to my open line question. My son is an eighth grader here in Columbia, and he’s doing a National History Day project, and it sort of ties in I think with your new book on the brave Pilgrims. And what he’s doing, the theme of the subject is rights and responsibility.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And he came up with the idea that the story that you often tell at Thanksgiving time, that the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving really wasn’t a bountiful time but rather there were several years of hard going for the Pilgrims and that it wasn’t until William Bradford reorganized the way they did their farming before they really started to produce an ample amount of food for themselves to the point that they could begin selling it.

RUSH: True, it wasn’t just their farming, though. It was everything, building the plantation, the village, the first town, the buildings, it was everything. It was largely agricultural, right, that’s all there was. They were all farmers. But that’s absolutely true. And it’s all in William Bradford’s journal. That’s what is so amazing about how this story’s been rewritten. William Bradford’s journal is the source for the entire Pilgrim experience, from the Mayflower forward. Even prior to the Mayflower, everything. He wrote extensively about the experience.

And it was William Bradford who explained how they wanted to be fair and they wanted everybody to have the same. It was a new place. They were scared to death. We can’t relate to this. They had no idea what they faced. They had this arduous journey. Do you know they had to live on the Mayflower? A lot of ’em had to live on the Mayflower for months after they arrived because there was no place to live. And it was a small ship. Conditions that people today, even in poverty, would not tolerate. And they tried to do it, everybody had the same, ’cause they thought there would be less acrimony and fewer rivalries if everybody got the same amount of what was produced. And they quickly learned — and William Bradford wrote about it — they learned that half the place took every day off. If they ended up getting the same everybody else got regardless of how much work they did, human nature took over.

CALLER: That’s right. And he’s been reading a lot of Bradford’s journal called History of Plymouth Plantation, and there are very good and very clear passages where Bradford describes the situation before they privatized farming and allowed people to keep the fruits of their labor and where he clearly states that, you know, prior to this, when everybody was working for the common stock, that there were a lot of malingerers within the colony. That even able-bodied men wouldn’t go out and work, let alone women and children. Whereas after they reorganized and made it where you could farm and keep the benefits of your work, that now women and young children, who would have been considered previously too weak and unable to work, were now out in the fields. They were putting a lot more corn in the ground and planting and also I guess instinctively harvesting more.

The challenge is in finding primary source raw data because Bradford doesn’t talk about, you know, prior to 1623, and even my son’s teacher, when he brought this idea to her, said, “Well, it was really that first winter, because, you know, they landed in November, and they weren’t provisioned properly for the whole winter, so that was their very most difficult time. But after the harvest of 1621, sort of everything was hunky-dory after that.” But Bradford’s journal, as you know, really indicates that up through 1623, was still sort of a starving time for many of the Pilgrims. The Thanksgivings that they had at the end of the year, I think one historian said that it was not so much a feast as it was what you would do at your Last Supper. And so the challenge for my son right now is finding these primary sources and data to show where that is, and I was calling to see if you had access to that kind of data or could put me in touch with your historians who helped you in researching this book.

RUSH: Well, there’s an index of — well, not actually an index in the book, but I went to great lengths to source this and primarily used Bradford’s journal. I don’t have at my fingertips here everything that I used for this. We historians don’t give away all of our tricks, obviously, because there’s so much conflict, and you can read historical accounts that totally try to blast the Bradford account to smithereens —

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: — simply because there’s a political agenda attached to everything. So part of it is knowing what to reject, and part of it’s knowing what to reject based on who it is and their motivations and so forth. But remember, now, the Thanksgiving story is only part of the story, but the real Thanksgiving was thanks to God. These were religious people, and Bradford was their leader, and they were thanking God for having survived and found a way to prosper.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Our last caller, Rich, his eighth grade son, and, as I say, we historians who go to great lengths and spend many countless hours researching things sometimes get very protective of things that we have discovered, found, written about, what have you. By the way, he was talking about this. We just got the book, folks. It’s not available yet, but we just got the actual book. I’m holding it up now for people on the Dittocam to see. And people said, “Why were you so excited about it? You’ve done this before.” I said, “Yeah, but I haven’t, not this.”

I’ve never done anything like this before in terms of target audience and objective. It’s always been my objective to teach and instruct, but this is something that’s so passionate in me. We just had this story, 57% of high school graduates are not prepared to go to college. They’re not prepared to learn in college. Well, part of that is what they’re being taught. And they’re not even being inspired to want to learn. In addition, what they are learning, in many cases about American history, is just wrong and it’s being taught by people who don’t like this country, for a whole host of reasons.

So the purpose of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims is to set this story straight. Now, the primary source for what happened to the Pilgrims is their leader, William Bradford. He wrote a journal. There’s also the Mayflower Compact, which is rich in its meaning. But for our caller, Rich, from Columbia, Maryland. The Plymouth Colony Archive Project is something that you might want to examine. The amount of information that there is about the Mayflower and the people on it from their families and ancestors is plentiful. It was a job of synthesis here in trying to stay focused with the target audience in mind. There are just countless places to go for this.

But the Plymouth Colony Archive Project, the Mayflower Compact, laws of the colony of New Plymouth in New England, 1620 to 1636, would probably help your son. All this stuff’s on the Web, or most of it is. But the real problem here is that most of the public schools today are not really teaching American history. If I can be blunt, in too many places — and by no means is it everywhere. I mean, there are still kids learning the truth about this country, but there’s an all-out assault on the truth of the history of this country, and, in many places, anti-American history is being taught. It’s taught by people who have a chip on their shoulder about this country, and they have a curriculum produced by people who have a chip on their shoulder about this country, and they are deeply resentful of what they think is lies about the greatness of this country, and, I’m sorry, but I don’t think that should stand.

So the book here is an effort to do something about that. It’s written for 10- to 13-year-olds, but it’s intended for everybody as a way for parents and grandparents to connect with their kids. And it’s a real book, as you can see. It’s not some little Dr. Seuss pamphlet. Nothing against Dr. Seuss. It’s not some little 10-page, thick paper, done within 10 minutes kind of thing. It’s 221 pages. It’s in there. And, by the way, you pre-order it, Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble. It’s like $10.99 or something. The retail price is in the $19 range. It was the number one pre-order book for, what was it, 12 days, something unprecedented, almost two weeks it was number one in the pre-orders. It was just incredible. I have a debt of gratitude to all of you for that. But now the book is here. The book is out on October 29th. The audio version is hot, too. I did it. It’s hot. And then of course the e-book. So all three made available on October 29th.